Fletcher Ball Bearings, based in Lewiston, Maine, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of precision bearings and bearing products. Fletcher sells its products to many industries, including aerospace, communications, health care, and defense. Ball bearings have many uses within these industries, such as gas turbine engines, fuel pumps, aircraft instruments, gyros, dental and surgical hand pieces, and electric motors. As one might expect, these are very complicated products and require a technical knowledge not only of the bearings themselves but also of the products of which they are an integral part. The company is divided into several divisions, each with its own specialized sales force. The Aero division manufactures and sells bearings for use in end products such as rotary-wing aircraft (helicopters), fixed-wing aircraft, jet engines, missiles, actuators, landing gear, starters, and satellites. The Aero division attempts to hire salespeople with an aerospace or engineering education and relevant work experience. However, the level of expertise varies drastically among its 150 salespeople, and even those with the highest expertise do not know everything because the technology changes so quickly.

A new director of sales, Gordon Chase, joined the company a year ago, and immediately began preaching the need for training in order for salespeople to stay up to date with product knowledge. However, the senior board of the company voted down his one-year training budget request of $8,000 per salesperson and instead reduced it to $2,000 per salesperson. The board’s complaint was that the company had spent a great deal of money on training in the past but could not identify any tangible benefits.

So Chase proceeded as best he could under the approved budget and set up a training program that provided five hours of classroom training per month for each salesperson. This included company orientation information, information on specifications of the ball bearings sold by the Aero division, and some information about the prime industry players and their products. The training was administered by internal company managers who were very knowledgeable as to the bearing products and specifications. They also were members of industry associations and had a good working knowledge of aerospace manufacturing operations at key account customers like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and NASA.

The classes were designed to have “something for everyone,” so each contained both basic and advanced information.

Chase was pleased that he was able to squeeze so many hours of training from his limited budget. However, not everyone shared his positive assessment. Joe Rodgers, one of the more senior salespeople, commented, “This one-size-fits-all approach of the training frustrates me to no end because in order to get a few nuggets of new, worthwhile information  I have to sit through two hours of things I already know!” He and others began to rebel and stopped going to training altogether. Conversely, the new salespeople felt like they were not getting enough introductory training and could not understand some of the more advanced technology updates because they were still trying to master the basics of being a salesperson. Also, the information on the customers and the end products was helpful but not nearly as detailed as the salespeople would have liked it to be.

Chase started a feedback program of collecting anonymous written evaluations after each classroom training session and began to see a trend of negative feelings from the employees. He was concerned that these negative assessments would be the death knell for his fledgling training program and knew he had to make some improvements before the next budget year.

Questions

1. What should Chase have said to the senior board to have received a higher training budget? How can Fletcher measure the benefits of a training program to justify its costs? 

2. What additional topics should the training cover?

3. What training methods or trainers other than classroom instruction by internal trainers might Chase consider using to improve the training? Why?

4. What changes would you recommend to help Aero division better satisfy the needs of new personnel versus experienced ones? Why?